Tools

I push a feature branch a dozen times a week. Every single time, the dance is the same: git push, switch to the browser, click the “Create MR” button, set assignee, set reviewer, add labels, wait for CI, click merge, switch back to terminal, git checkout main, git pull, git branch -d feature/.... It’s not hard. It’s just tedious — and the kind of friction that adds up over a week.

I had a shell script glued together with glab, gh, jq, yq, and gum doing this for years. It worked, but it broke whenever any of those tools updated and was a pain to ship to a fresh laptop. So I rewrote the whole thing in Go and called it auto-mr. One binary, no external CLIs, works on both GitLab and GitHub.

I love how goreleaser looks when it runs. Tidy bullets, indented sub-steps, the right amount of color, occasional spinners. Every time I write a Go CLI of my own, I want that aesthetic — and I don’t want to pull in a 100-dependency logging framework to get it. So I wrote bullets.

Every shell scripter has, at some point, googled “date subtract day mac” or “GNU date macOS BSD difference” and wished they hadn’t. The date command is one of the most platform-fragmented tools in any Unix toolbox: GNU date and BSD date disagree on basically every flag that matters. And once you’ve worked out the syntax for “yesterday,” you still need to do something useful with it — like generate a range of timestamps for a backfill, or compute end-of-month, or skip weekends.

I got tired of this. So I wrote calcdate. Same binary on Linux, macOS, anywhere. One expression syntax. Version 2 just landed and the syntax is now genuinely pleasant to use.

Once you start using Claude Code seriously, you accumulate prompts. A snippet that always produces the right golangci.yml. A spell that turns “I need a GitLab CI pipeline” into a working .gitlab-ci.yml. A code-review checklist you keep pasting in. After enough copy-paste, the obvious move is to package those into proper Claude Code plugins. That’s what claude-plugins is.

INI files refuse to die. Samba, PHP, Git, MySQL, half of /etc — they’re everywhere, and editing them from a shell script is annoying enough that people reach for sed, regret it, and then write a much worse bug. gini is the tiny tool I wrote so I could stop doing that.